Good neighbours

One is a medieval market town, its neighbour a modern garden village built on a key RAF airfield. Let’s find out about West Malling and Kings Hill

- Caroline Read

HISTORY

These two close neighbors are worlds apart. West Malling is an ancient market town built around a 900-year-old abbey, while Kings Hill is a modern community built on the site of a wartime airfield.

Beginning with West Malling, we must travel back to 1090 and not long after the Norman invasion, when Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, chose the tiny Saxon settlement as the setting for a great abbey. The nuns were given the right to run a market outside the abbey gates and the town, which was known until relatively recently as ‘Town Malling’ slowly grew.

Parts of the original abbey are still there, although mainly hidden behind high walls. Occasional public tours of the buildings are offered by the community of Anglican Benedictine nuns who still call Malling Abbey home.

Easier to get a good look at – although only from outside – is the unusual St Leonards Tower, a short walk from the town center. The ruin is a mystery, having been used by farmers as a store for hundreds of years and its origins long forgotten. The safest guess is that it was a Norman keep, built around the same time as the abbey.

With numerous Tudor and Georgian listed buildings along the pretty High Street and Swan Street, it’s easy to see that much of the original look of the town has remained unchanged. Although it went through a certain amount of development, the heart of the town is pretty and compact.